APPENDIX D 



COPIED BY PERMISSION FROM THE TIMES, 

 LONDON, 2ND JANUARY 1953 



OLDEST OF FISHES 



ORIGINS AND IMPORTANCE OF THE COELACANTH 

 By Professor J. L. B. Smith 



Grahamstown, January ist 



THE word 'Coelacanth' — pronounced 'seelakanth' — means 'hollow 

 spine'. Only 14 years ago probably not more than 1,000 human 

 beings had any notion of what the word meant, and probably not one 

 in every 100,000 had ever heard the word at all. On the other hand, 

 over the past 100 years to a small and select group of scientific intel- 

 lects this word has stood for a remarkable race of fishlike creatures of 

 almost incredible antiquity. 



These fish were some of the first to appear in that dim and distant 

 past when life on this planet began. This is no guesswork; brilliant 

 men working from often only fragmentary fossilized remains have, 

 step by step, built up a chronological picture of the main stages in the 

 development of life on this planet. The age of the earth as a separate 

 entity is estimated at about 3,000 million years. It was, in the beginning, 

 no more than hot viscous matter and gas, rapidly cooling in its whirling 

 course. By about one thousand million years ago the earth was settling 

 down with a solid crust, mostly bare rock, and the ocean was completely 

 enveloped in dense cloud, its surface lashed by storms and torrential 

 rain much more terrible than anything we know today. 



By about sixteen hundred million years ago something queer had hap- 

 pened. What we call 'life' had come to the earth. If you take a fragment 

 of iron ore and treat it with water and heat, it changes to a soft, slimy 

 substance which can flow and adapt its shape to the surface on which it 

 rests. In that state it is much more 'reactive' than the hard rocky ore, 

 and can absorb other substances, which, while profoundly changing 

 its fundamental structure, leave it still able to go on absorbing still 

 other substances. Some time, somewhere, there was possibly formed 

 from other elements a jelly with power to move on its own — not only 



